Quotes About Survival

The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Survival is a zero-sum game.

The big firms that survive will do so by turning themselves into bottom-up evolvers.

homini lupus', said Plautus. 'Man is a wolf to man.

almost all biologists agreed that no creature could ever evolve the ability to help its species at the expense of itself. Only when the two interests coincided would it act selflessly.

This isn't about auctions,' said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, 'in fact it's not about economic warfare. It's the opposite.' It was survival of the nicest.

The Brazilian diplomat Josué de Castro, in his book The Geopolitics of Hunger, was even bolder in his criticism of the neo-Malthusians, saying that 'The road to survival, therefore, does not lie in the neo-Malthusian prescriptions to eliminate surplus people, nor in birth control, but in the effort to make everybody on the face of the earth productive.' In

A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience. Why?

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth that still fills me with astonishment. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

The characteristic signature of poverty is a return to self-sufficiency.

story of a philosopher who runs when a bear charges him and his friend.

It's no good, you'll never outrun a bear," says the logical friend.

So plants can withstand almost any loss, and regenerate easily. They are utterly decentralised.

Imagine you are a deer. You have essentially only four things to do during the day: sleep, eat, avoid being eaten and socialise (by which I mean mark a territory, pursue a member of the opposite sex, nurse a fawn, whatever).

Imagine if you had to be completely self-sufficient (not just pretending, like Thoreau).

There are few clearings in an elm forest and few vacancies on an oyster bed. Each vacancy will attract many thousands of applicants in the form of new seeds or larvae. Therefore, it does not matter that your young are good enough to survive. What matters is whether they are the very best. Sex gives variety, so sex makes a few of your offspring exceptional and a few abysmal, whereas asex makes them all average.

In the world of the Red Queen, any evolutionary progress will be relative as long as your foe is animate and depends heavily on you or suffers heavily if you thrive, like the seals and the bears. Thus the Red Queen will be especially hard at work among predators and their prey, parasites and their hosts, and males and females of the same species. Every creature on earth is in a Red Queen chess tournament with its parasites (or hosts), its predators (or prey), and, above all, with its mate.

At the cost of some extra work, women get to eat some good protein without having to chase it; men get to know where the next meal is coming from if they fail to kill a deer.

The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Survival is a zero-sum game. Success only makes one species a more tempting target for a rival species.

Red Queen theories hold that the world is competitive to the death. It does keep changing. But did we not just hear that species are static for many generations and do not change? Yes. The point about the Red Queen is that she runs but stays in the same place. The world keeps coming back to where it started; there is change but not progress.

Sex, according to the Red Queen theory, has nothing to do with adapting to the inanimate world—becoming bigger or better camouflaged or more tolerant of cold or better at flying—but is all about combating the enemy that fights back.

For instance, given the choice between a safe, comfortable and long life for the individual or a risky, tiring and dangerous attempt to breed, virtually all animals (and indeed plants) choose the latter.

Indeed, their bodies are designed with planned obsolescence called ageing that causes them to decay after they reach breeding age – or, in the case of squid or Pacific salmon, to die at once. None of this makes any sense unless you view the body as a vehicle for the genes, as a tool used by genes in their competition to perpetuate themselves. The body's survival is secondary to the goal of

the universe was not created for or about human beings, that we are not special, and there was no Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty in the distant past, but only a primitive battle for survival.

Survival here means simply an incomplete death, not a partial life -- to be trapped in a gap between the living and the dead. If I had a thousand tongues, I would not try to describe the agony!